White Knights in the Black Orchestra

2

The Fog of After-War

ADOLF HITLER WAS Austrian by birth, but served in the Bavarian Division of the German army during World War I, in four years somehow failing to rise above the lowly rank of lance corporal. Twice wounded, he suffered no ill effects other than a permanent inability to swallow the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. That peace agreement saddled Germany with crippling war reparations totaling $33 billion, plus the emasculation of its military, limited to one hundred thousand troops and thirty-six naval vessels. The final humiliation was a War Guilt Clause, which required Germany to accept sole responsibility “for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected.”¹

In September 1919, while still on active duty in Munich after the war, Corporal Hitler became the fifty-fifth member of the fledgling, far-right German Workers’ Party. The next year he left the army and took a job as the party’s chief of propaganda. He helped push through a name change to the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (“Nazis” for short) and designed an eye-catching flag that featured a black crooked-cross swastika superimposed on a field of red and white. He soon ascended to chairman of the party.

On November 8, 1923, Hitler decided to use the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich as his launching pad for an inept, spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the district government of Bavaria. The so-called Beer Hall Putsch resulted in the Nazi Party being outlawed and its ringleader getting sentenced to five years in Landsberg Prison for treason. He only had to do eight months under lenient conditions, using that time to crank out an autobiography-cum-political manifesto. Hitler was released just before Christmas 1924 and immediately wangled to get the Nazi Party reinstated. A few months later Mein Kampf (in English, My Struggle) appeared in print, selling only 9,473 copies its first year, but significantly raising the author’s political profile.² The book outlined the Nazi Party’s plans for revitalizing Germany, which heavily depended upon jettisoning the Treaty of Versailles and ridding the country of pernicious communists, socialists, and Jews.

Mein Kampf made mention of only one American: reactionary automobile magnate Henry Ford. “It is Jews who govern the Stock Exchange forces of the American union,” Hitler wrote. “Only a single great man, Ford, to their fury, still maintains full independence.”³ He’d long been an admirer, and a photo of Ford hung on a wall inside Hitler’s Munich office.⁴ A year before Mein Kampf came out, an American reporter asked Hitler if he thought Mr. Ford should someday run for president of the United States. “I wish I could send some of my shock troops to Chicago and other big American cities to help in the elections,” he said.⁵ “We look at Heinrich Ford as the leader of the growing fascist movement in America.”⁶

WHILE STILL REELING from World War I, Germany began to feel the effects of a mushrooming worldwide depression that originated in the United States. Unemployment climbed past 8 percent, on its way to 30 percent. Industrial production shriveled, inflation skyrocketed, and a loaf of bread cost more than a million reichsmarks.⁷ The exchange rate for US dollars was more than four trillion to one. German money was so worthless that children glued paper bills together to make kites. Adults watched their savings literally go up in smoke, using wads of reichsmarks for fire kindling.⁸

Political instability compounded the turmoil. The country had been ruled by a hereditary monarchy from 1871 until the end of the Great War, when Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated under pressure and beat a hasty retreat to the Netherlands. The resulting postwar Weimar Republic became an experiment in democracy, so bold that women were granted voting rights, so chaotic that more than thirty parties were running candidates for office.

In some respects, the Germans overdesigned their political system, building a car with two engines. Under the new constitution, a largely ceremonial president—elected to a seven-year term by popular vote—served as titular commander of the military. But the presidency was also vested with emergency powers that, in times of crisis, could circumvent the other branches of government. The true constitutional center of power was a ruling chancellor and a cabinet, both of which required approval of the Reichstag, a legislative body analogous to Britain’s House of Commons. Each political party’s representation in the Reichstag was determined by its performance at the polls, with one seat awarded for every sixty thousand votes tallied. Members of a second, less powerful, legislative body, the Reichsrat, were appointed by the states and functioned much like Britain’s House of Lords.

The center-left Social Democratic Party led every Weimar government—but never achieved majority status, depending instead on a succession of fragile coalitions. In the 1928 elections, the Social Democrats won 30 percent of the vote, good for only 153 of the Reichstag’s then 491 seats, forcing them to form a shaky alliance with three smaller parties. The Nazis pulled only 2.6 percent of that vote. However, to an increasing number of Germans, decisive leadership taken to ultranationalist extremes seemed preferable to rudderless governance. If nothing else, Hitler exuded confidence. A volcanic orator forever fuming about communists and Jews driving the country into the ground, he graduated from speaking at rowdy beer halls to holding outdoor rallies for twenty thousand or more adoring Nazi converts.⁹

BY 1930 THE Social Democratic Party’s share of the vote had shrunk to 24 percent, with Nazis leapfrogging into second spot at 18 percent. The Social Democrats pieced together another flimsy coalition that soon imploded. Grandfatherly Paul von Hindenburg—a hulking former World War I field marshal now in his eighties—had been elected president in 1925. He interceded and, using his emergency powers, assembled a minority government headed by the more moderate Centre Party. Germany was basically marching in place, and by doing so falling deeper into the throes of the Depression.

Hindenburg won reelection in 1932 and retooled the Centre Party coalition he’d created. On June 1 he snubbed Hitler and tapped Franz von Papen, a hard-line conservative who avoided theatrics, to be chancellor. But Papen had so little support in the Reichstag that Hindenburg had to quickly call for new parliamentary elections in July. The Nazis campaigned under the slogan “All Power to Adolf Hitler,” claiming a communist revolt was at hand that only he could avert.¹⁰ The fearmongering worked. The Nazis captured 37 percent of the vote and became the largest political party, although clueless in the art of coalition building. They couldn’t find any partners to form a government. A third round of elections had to be scheduled for November.

The Nazis backtracked in that vote, losing thirty-four Reichstag seats. Weeks of jockeying for position ensued. In the end, Papen resorted to a palace-intrigue gambit. He convinced Hindenburg to name Hitler chancellor, while he would selflessly accept a demotion to vice chancellor, fully expecting to outsmart everyone and become puppet master of his neophyte rival. Papen bragged to a political ally, “In two months we’ll have pushed Hitler so far into the corner that he’ll squeal.”¹¹

Befuddled, eighty-five-year-old Paul von Hindenburg administered the oath of office to Chancellor Adolf Hitler around noon on January 30, 1933. He vowed to “employ my strength for the welfare of the German people, protect the Constitution and laws of the German people… with justice to everyone.”¹²

That night celebratory torchlight parades snaked through the streets of Berlin, led by stone-faced SA stormtroopers. The future had arrived, flashing straight-arm “Heil Hitler!” salutes.

PAULA AND KARL Bonhoeffer’s three oldest sons were drafted during World War I. Walter, the second oldest and hardest to picture carrying a rifle, was eighteen when he departed for the front. In April 1918, after just a month in uniform, Walter Bonhoeffer was injured in an artillery attack.¹³ “Today I had the second operation,” he said in a letter to his parents mailed from a field hospital. “But there are more interesting things in the world at present than my wound.” He died three hours later. Paula spent weeks in bed crippled with grief. Her husband always wrote a family update in his diary on New Year’s Eve. After Walter was killed, Karl couldn’t bring himself to make an entry for ten years.

The Bonhoeffers dreaded the prospect of going through that kind of anguish again. The whole family detested Hitler, not just for his politics, but also for his constant threats to disrupt the peace in Europe. When Dietrich returned to Berlin in late June 1931, those threats were inching closer to the realm of possibility.

While Hitler went about the business of consolidating power, Bonhoeffer embarked on his life’s work. Technical College of Berlin hired him as a student chaplain. In November he was finally ordained. Two months after that he began teaching part-time at the University of Berlin. His lectures on the book of Genesis got turned into a book, Creation and Fall, in which he wrote, “The Bible tells only two temptation stories, the temptation of the first man and the temptation of Christ.… Either the Adam in me is tempted—in which case we fall. Or the Christ in us is tempted—in which case Satan is bound to fall.”

Pastor Bonhoeffer never felt tempted to consort with Nazis. In fact, he committed one of the first small public acts of resistance against the new regime. Two days after Hitler’s inauguration, at 5:45 p.m. sharp, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stepped up to a microphone inside the House of Broadcasting in downtown Berlin. He gave a fifteen-minute live speech on the Berlin Radio Hour, which was doing a multiweek, multipart series on Germany’s “Younger Generation.”

Other speakers were booked to talk about rural youth or how today’s high school students compared to their predecessors. Bonhoeffer chose a weightier topic: “The Younger Generation’s Altered Concept of the Führer,” führer meaning “supreme leader.”¹⁴ He ended his segment with a thinly veiled reference to Hitler. Should anyone in a position of power “surrender to the wishes of his followers, who would always make him their idol, then the image of the leader will gradually become the image of the misleader,” Bonhoeffer warned. “Leaders or offices which set themselves up as gods mock God.”¹⁵

Those were bold words of wisdom. And nobody heard them. The sound cut out just as Bonhoeffer reached the climax of his mini broadcast. He initially suspected foul play, but it turned out he’d simply gone over his allotted time, leaving the studio engineer no choice but to switch to the next scheduled program.¹⁶ Determined to get his thoughts on record somewhere, Bonhoeffer mailed a copy of his radio script to a regional newspaper, which published the full text.¹⁷

LATER THAT SAME winter’s night, another speaker took to the airwaves. Chancellor Hitler kept his remarks surprisingly short and sweet. His inaugural radio address to his countrymen lasted only thirteen and a half minutes. He talked about how German unemployment must be reduced “within four years” and how he would be “happy if the world, by restricting its armaments, made unnecessary any increase in our own weapons.” No sturm. No drang. No beating of the war drums.¹⁸

“Herr Hitler in office,” the New York Times reported, “spoke more moderately in tone and words tonight than he had as the roving spellbinder of the last two years.”¹⁹

Earlier that day, however, Hitler issued a more typical fire-breathing “proclamation” to Nazi Party insiders, assuring them he would deal with “the Communist murder organization” intent on destroying his newly born Third Reich. “Keep calm!” he instructed his followers. “The hour for crushing this terror will come.”²⁰

²⁰

3

Sounds and Fury

DESPITE BEING WORTH some $100 million, Henry Ford had a part-time job. The president of Ford Motor Company moonlighted as a newspaper publisher, using the editorial pages of the Dearborn (Michigan) Independent as a personal megaphone. In the early 1920s he decided to step out from behind that curtain of anonymity and release a compilation of the paper’s political and cultural ruminations under his own name. The four-volume set was titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Adolf Hitler kept copies stacked on a table outside his office for curious readers.¹ This was Henry Ford without brakes applied. Among the topics expounded upon were “How Jewish International Finance Functions,” “The Jewish Associates of Benedict Arnold,” and, in volume three, chapter 47… Jews and jazz, a nascent art form that clearly had gotten under his country-music-loving midwestern skin.

“Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation,” Ford groused. “Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of cave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes.… It is rather surprising, is it not, that whichever way you turn to trace the harmful streams of influence that flow through society, you come upon a group of Jews?”²

Oh, and by the way: jazz-inspired crazy-leg dances like the Charleston encouraged promiscuity.³

Monkey talk? Cave love? Apparently bemused by Ford’s jibes, in 1927 Julian Fuhs—a slim, bespectacled pianist who split time between the United States and his native Germany—went into a Berlin studio with his small orchestra and recorded “Let’s All Henry Ford,” a swinging Charleston-flavored instrumental that contained a few incongruous country-and-westerny fiddle riffs and honking horns. The song name was a playful twist on “Let’s All Go to Mary’s House,” a hot-jazz hit from a few years before.

Dubbed “Berlin’s Jazz King” by the Associated Press, Fuhs was the first German band leader to cover George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” He had a string of other records to his credit that posed no threat to Gershwin, among them “Bananas’ Skin Stomp” and “Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Doktor.”⁴ In an interview with a Canadian newspaper, Fuhs said Germans initially regarded this high-spirited, unregimented slice of Americana as “too much noise.” But it grew on them.

“Jazz music today is recognized by all the people—with the exception of a few National Socialist grumblers who still want the Vienna Waltz to come back, which of course it never will.”

GERMANY WAS ON the cusp of political and social upheaval. Hitler combined personality-cult charisma with nostalgia-laced xenophobia. Musically speaking, his forte was a tightly choreographed Vienna waltz of authoritarianism, the polar opposite of the raucous ensemble jazz of multiparty democracy. His Brownshirts and SS enforcers lost no time sending public messages that Chancellor Hitler’s ascension marked the dawning of a new, more muscular day in Germany.

Fuhs, meanwhile, had put down deeper roots in Berlin. He and his wife, Lily, owned an eponymous nightclub where he sometimes played solo piano. “Bei Julian Fuhs” was on the city’s west side, just down the street from the Eden Hotel, a magnet for artists, actors, and journalists. Late one night in mid-March 1933, two Brownshirts barged into the club and roughed up Fuhs without warning, calling him a “dirty Jew” and a “dirty liar,” falsely claiming he owed money to a creditor. Lily called the municipal police, who hauled the intruders away.

Two and a half weeks later, six men—four of whom were Brownshirts—bulldozed their way through the door at five o’clock in the morning and ordered a round of drinks.⁵